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| Family: Melanthiaceae (False-Hellbore) |
| Flowers — color: white, size: 3/4", type: 6 petals |
| color | white |
| style | six petals |
I found some beautiful white flowers growing in a patch of poison oak. When I got home and looked more closely, I saw the poison oak flowers were the tiny things at the top of the detail photo. It took several return hikes to locate this specimen, the long leaves below the poison oak mittens. No poison oaks were damaged while making this picture.
Fremont's Death-Camas's flower has six tepals, about 3/4". Technically, botanists describe this as three petals and three similar sepals. Each is white with a yellow-green base. I sense the petals are narrower than the sepals. Six extended white stamens have bulbous anthers with yellow pollen.
The flower stem rises several feet above the base. The cluster is a panicle, many branching racemes, linear arrays blooming from base to tip.
Habit:
Fremont's Death-Camas is a perennial herb related to lilies and onions. A half dozen leaves grow skyward from the bulb, six to eighteen inches long and up to one inch wide. I was struck by the triangular crosssection of the initial growth, and took a photo before I understood how it might bloom. I saw one specimen raising a tall flower stalk with multiple clusters, but missed it several weeks later when the blooms were expected.
The genus name means poison garlic in Greek. All parts are harmful to humans and livestock. It was very dangerous for Native Americans foraging for wild onions as the bulbs were similar.
Shady to part shade.